There are bricks in conspiracism that are reminiscent of radical democratism: the community of citizens in the state as a concrete and participatory form of their community of isolated individuals. But the situation has changed since the 1990s and early 2000s.
In the capitalism resulting from the restructuring of the 1970s/1980s, the reproduction of labor-power was the object of a double disconnection. On the one hand, there is a disconnection between the valorization of capital and the reproduction of labor-power, and on the other, a disconnection between consumption and wages as income.
The rupture of a necessary relation between capital valorization and the reproduction of labor-power breaks apart areas of reproduction that are coherent in their national or even regional delimitation. It is a question of separating, on the one hand, the reproduction and circulation of capital and, on the other, the reproduction and circulation of labor-power.
As the identity of a crisis of over-accumulation and under-consumption, the crisis of 2008 was a crisis of the wage relation which became a crisis of the wage society by setting in motion all the strata and classes of society that live on wages. Everywhere, with the wage society, it was a question of politics and distribution. As the price of labor (fetish form), the wage understandably appeals to the injustice of distribution. The injustice of distribution has an author who has “failed in their mission”: the state. The issue at stake here is the legitimacy of the state vis-à-vis its society. The proletariat participates in all of this, in its own structuring as the class that takes it on board.
In the crisis of the wage society, struggles around distribution point to the state as responsible for injustice. This state is the de-nationalized state, traversed by and as an agent of globalization. In contrast to “de-nationalization”, Keynesian policies were part of a “nationalized integration”: combination of the national economy, national consumption, training and education of a national workforce and a mastery of money and credit. In the “Fordist period”, the state had also become “the key to well-being”, and it was this citizenship that was pushed aside in the restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s. If citizenship is an abstraction, it refers to very concrete content: full employment, nuclear family, order-proximity-security, heterosexuality, work, nation. It is around these themes that class conflicts and the de-legitimation of all official discourse are ideologically reconstructed in the crisis of the wage society. Citizenship then becomes the ideology under which class struggle is conducted. There is a clear link between the success of conspiracy theories and many other expressions, for example the Gilets Jaunes.